White Rabbit
by JadeEye
Summary: AU. Serena's a Batman wannabe, and Darien's her (former) Computer Science T.A. Together, they fight crime. And sexual tension.


**Title: **White Rabbit

**Summary**: AU. Serena's a Batman wannabe, and Darien's her (former) Computer Science T.A. Together, they fight crime. And sexual tension.

**Rating**: M. Violence, drug abuse, language, sexual content.

**A/N: **Shameless drug- and idea-stealing from Rocque-Clasique and her amazing 'Drive-verse. If you like Dean or just well-written Supernatural fics, check that masterpiece out. Inspiration also from Frank Miller's _The Dark Knight Returns_ and Big_Pink's _Fire In the Hole._

This is _not_ STC Serena/Darien. This is grittier, maybe even nasty, and completely OOC so far as canon goes, so beware the rating and any characterization preferences. For my STC readers, I am so sorry. I'm the worst person ever, but this is all I have to offer in lieu of an STC update.

- o -

Darien steals her drink. And doesn't even bother to look sneaky about it. Just grabs it when the waiter sets on the table, and takes a long, exaggerated sip from the sweating glass.

"Ahem." And when he doesn't even look over, Sere says more loudly, "A-_hem_."

He looks over. "Yes, Umbridge?"

She gives him a _bitch, please_ look. "Umbridge said _hem-hem_, you heathen. If you're going to use Harry Potter against me, at least get it right."

He shrugs, now snagging the bright pink straw in his lips and smirking around it. "Sounded like she said ahem in the movies."

She isn't even going to pursue this conversation with someone who hasn't even read the books. "Gimme my drink."

He curls a hand around it. "You mean my drink?"

"I'm pretty sure I'm the one who ordered it."

"Yeah, and I was sure you must've ordered it for me. Considering how I covered you for, let's see, four milkshakes last week, and you promised to reimburse me but still have not done so." He smirks around the straw again, all wicked lips and dark eyes. "Consider this the beginning of your repayment."

Sere lets out a frustrated sound and kicks his shin-the good one-under the table of the booth they're sitting in with a bunch of friends after the football game. Dare's friend Asanuma barks with laughter; Rei rolls her eyes.

"Call me when you guys can act like adults again," she says, sliding out of the booth, undoubtedly to go flirt with the male swimmers gathered around the pool table in the corner. "Oh wait-you're incapable of that."

"It's a life choice," Dare quips. Serena grabs the moment of his distraction to grab her drink and gulp down a huge mouthful of it.

"Mmm-mmm." She smacks her lips loudly. She's got a new brand of lip gloss on tonight, a cheap brand that makes her smacks extra loud and, she notices with satisfaction, leaves a big glossy ring on the rim of the glass.

She slides it back to him, watching his eyes go to the pink ring and smirking when he looks at her. His eyes go challenging back, and he drawls, "Thanks, sweetheart," puts his mouth right on the big pink ring and takes another sip. He makes a low hum of satisfaction, eyes never leaving hers above the rim of the glass.

And Sere has to look away.

- o -

See, 'cuz here's the thing. Theirs is a business relationship. And even if it wasn't, Darien's kind of more a hate-fucker than a love-fucker. Like, he's all about the angry sex. He's hisses and grunts and growls and other things loud enough for Sere to hear through the earpiece the times he's forgotten to turn off the mic during her patrols, and she'd give him shit about that if it didn't mean admitting that she'd listened to it, not once, or twice, but all three of the times it's happened in the year-and-some he's been working the handler-role for White Rabbit.

So. The fact that Dare keeps giving her the "let's have sex" eyes (and grazing her arm with "let's have sex" fingers and using the "let's have sex" voice that is somehow even more potent when it's coming through her earpiece) isn't actually a good thing.

- o-

"Wow, could you have disabled that security system any more slowly? If I was still your T.A., I'd fail you."

"Nice to see you, too, jerkface." Sere slaps the back of his head as she walks past his desk chair, stripping off her white helmet. It's a gentle slap, since she's still wearing her plated gloves, but Dare catches her wrist in a motion faster than she can follow. He drops it just as quickly, and yeah, here's another one of those things they're going to pretend didn't happen, because his face is going stony and he's swiveling back around to face his bank of computer screens.

"Maybe you should've been a better teacher," she says, trying to return the atmosphere to normal, and plugs into one of his CPUs the flash drive she filled that night.

"I was an _awesome_ teacher," he says, clicking open the files.

"Yeah, that's why so many people dropped your class." She plops down on the table behind his desk, watching the screen. "Look like I got anything good?"

"Let's see. Porn, porn...more porn, and... Jesus, he must have the premium subscri-ah. Here we go. A delivery schedule." Another click, and a shift in the silence that she's somehow come to recognize in the past month as the sound of a smirk creeping onto his face. "Looks like you've got yourself a hot date Tuesday night, carrot-cake."

- o -

Before Darien joined up, White Rabbit's operation was less an...operation and more a...skulk around at night wearing a ski mask and carrying three extra cans of pepper spray. She wasn't all that effective, but she stopped enough bad stuff most nights to feel like the lost sleep, and her dorm-mates thinking she was some sort of slut who got back at three in the morning every night smelling of booze and sweat, was worth it. Not that Juuban was, like, Gotham-bad on the crime scale, but it was a big city, and big cities were always going to be prime places for criminals to work, just like roadkill lying in the street was always going to be a great place for flies and ants to swarm for a buffet.

Still, there's a difference between patrolling the streets for four, five hours and only catching maybe one or two crimes a night, and knowing ahead of time where the crimes are going to happen, heading them off before they start. That's where Darien comes in. He has police scanners, God only knows how, and knows how to use them, God only knows how, and he has _ambition_, which she doesn't think God has anything to do with. Sere was looking to save drunk sorority girls from getting taken home by sketchy guys downtown; Dare's looking to topple drug lords, bust child porn rings, and route corrupt cops from the police force. The Five-Year Plan, he calls it, and Sere teases him about how in five year he'll _look_ like Chairman Mao, and doesn't think about how maybe this means he thinks in five years they'll still be together like this, cooking dinner at each others' places, and watching lame ABC sitcoms when some injury or other's got her laid up, and bitching at each other like they're a married couple too lazy to get divorced.

So tonight she's at the docks, crouching behind a stack of crates that smell worse than shit, more like whatever the bacteria that eat shit then shit out themselves, and waiting for the drug drop-off that the intel she pulled off Stanton's computer two nights ago says will be taking place any minute now.

Her thighs are beginning to cramp by the time a set of headlights join the half-hearted glow from the streetlights along the pier. "Stanton's here," she murmurs into her comm, not expecting an answer from Dare. For simple runs like this, he mostly ignores her and does his computer stuff; they only keep the line up in case something were to come up, like the time a few months back when the two robbers she was taking out turned out to be three, one of whom was behind her. With a gun that fucking _hurt_ when he pistol-whipped the back of her head with it.

Like that job, this one starts out simple. She positions herself on a fire escape, moving silently, and waits until a moving van rattles down the street and into one of the loading docks. Three men get out of it, two of them heading toward the Volvo, from which two figures emerge, one of them with Stanton's god-awful, David-Bowie-from-_Labyrinth_ mullet. At this point, she thumbs her comm once, twice, so Dare will know to contact 911 from one of his scrambled lines and tell the operator he heard gunshots down at the docks.

If Sere does her job right, there won't be, but they've found from experience that when they think gunfire's involved, JPD gets to the scene a hell of a lot faster, and Sere wants to make sure they get there before anyone gets away. She's kick-ass, yes, which is why she'll be able to get Stanton and his bodyguard incapacitated before they even know she's there, but she's also only one person, so if one of the three thugs who came off the drug-boat takes off, she might not be able to catch him _and_ take care of the other two.

She waits for Dare's two-click notification that the cops are within two minutes of her location, which will mean she can swoop in and do her thing. She waits, and waits, and _waits_, beginning to sweat. Stanton finishes talking to the men, takes what looks like a Tickle-Me-Tuxedo doll from one of them and peers inside its top hat. They say something, and then Stanton nods, and his bodyguard takes a box from the men and puts it in the Volvo's trunk. Stanton slides back into the backseat. The chauffeur starts the car.

No. Crap. Bad enough if Stanton gets away, but he's taking a box of the Tuxedo dolls with him, which she has to assume contain the drugs she and Dare have been tracking. If it was any other drug, she might take down the ship full of the rest of the shipment and let Stanton get away with the box, but the reason they've been hot on Stanton's ass is 'cuz he's been cutting his cocaine with some weird new powder Dare hasn't been able to ID yet but has already landed two prostitutes and a john in Juuban General, and they can_not_ let that stuff out on the streets.

"Dare," she hisses into the com. "Where the hell are the cops?"

But there's no answer, and for the first time fear flares in her belly. It pushes her off the fire escape, sends her onto the bodyguard's back, dispatching him with a quick, silent strike to the temple. He crumples to the ground, and already Stanton's whipping around to point a gun at her, but she's in a crouch, coming up from under his elbow, grabbing his forearm with one hand, popping the elbow up and out with the other, sending the gun flying from his grip. It goes off, and she winces, runs her mental catalogue of _anything-hurt-anything-feel-wet-anything-feel-hot? _ even as she's slamming Stanton against his Volvo's side mirror. He goes to the ground, limp, and she wastes the precious seconds to loop wire around his wrists and ankles as the moving van's engine roars to life behind her.

She takes off at a run, wishing she had a grapple gun like a proper superhero. She'd shoot it at their bumper and let it reel her in. Instead, she's making a sprint for her Rabbit-cycle two blocks away, throwing herself behind a Dumpster when police sirens suddenly wail into the street behind her.

Shit. She is going to _kill_ Darien.

- o -

The first time she visited Dare's place, there was a skinny dark-haired woman sprawled on the couch, face pressed against a cushion and lathe-thin legs hanging over the couch arm. She was mumbling something to the floor. Sere was green at that point but not _that_ green; she recognized the foil and the spoon on the table, and wondered what the hell she'd just walked into.

But Dare just waved a hand at her in that careless way he had. "My girlfriend," he said. "Claire, meet Sere. Sere, Claire."

Claire was so clearly out of it Sere wasn't sure if she was supposed to expect a response, or go over and shake her hand, or what, but Dare was already clomping into the kitchen, so she just followed him.

Claire didn't wake up that whole visit, and on the next she was watching TV with something spicy-smelling wisping smoke between her fingers, and Sere saw the way Dare closed his eyes and inhaled and looked _hungry_, and she said, "You know, I've got a...thing. I'm gonna go."

Using was nothing new at college, though it was never something Sere'd done herself-God, she knew how easily those things got cut with something unclean, had seen enough people shoot themselves over it-and she knew it was bigger among the grad students. She had just never considered it in the context of Darien. Had seen him popping open an orange prescription bottle sometimes, known that sometimes his bad leg gave him trouble, but he did it so rarely in her presence that she'd figured it wasn't that big a deal.

- o -

Now, she knows better. Has come back from patrols and found Dare asleep in the chair, has seen how, when he wakes up, his teeth are gritted together and he holds himself carefully and perspiration breaks out along his forehead when he tries to wrestle himself up out of the chair with his cane. How he never, ever lets her help him up.

When she bursts into the dark room he uses as his office, panting and stinking strongly of the Dumpster she crawled into the avoid the cops, he's just a dark shape slumped in his desk chair. The computer monitor's gone to screensaver mode, the colorful patterns twisting across it illuminating the orange bottle clutched in his hand. There were at least three or four doses left in it when she last saw it, and now it looks almost empty.

Half the fury drains out of her, and the other half just flares brighter.

"Dare. Dare, hey." She crouches in front of him. She knows better than to leave him sleeping in the chair, knows the pain and cramps he'll have trying to get out of the chair will only get worse the longer he stays in it. "Wake up, you jerk."

His eyes flutter open. His pupils are barely there, swallowed up by blue-_victim_, she thinks immediately, involuntarily, conditioned by a hundred kids in clubs and alleys with the same eyes, the same downward sweep of their eyelashes as they twist away from coming down from the high. He groans something at her, tries to pull away.

"No way," she says, grabbing him under the arms. She suddenly feels more tired than angry. "You'll kill me if I let you sleep here. Are you good? Do you need to eat something before I throw you into bed?"

"Throw me, huh," he slurs, which she takes as a no to the offer of food. Between the two of them, they manage to stumble him into his room, get him onto the bed. He lowers himselfslowly to the pillow as Sere sits on the edge of his bed, shoves his pant leg up and unstraps his leg brace. It always surprises her how pale he is underneath it, the dark hairs scattered across the white skin, ghost-white where the blood's been pressed out of it from the brace digging into him all day, the ropes of raised scar tissue from a surgery she's never had the guts to ask about. She watches the blood rush back into his leg, the slow fade from neon-white to fish-belly pale. When she looks back up, Dare's watching her, eyes still inhumanly blue.

He closes them. "Sere."

She'd been planning to help him out of his jacket, but maybe that isn't such a good idea. She rubs her sweaty palms down her legs, and lets herself out.

- o -

It was an idle question, the first time she saw him. Stumping into the cramped basement room where he taught Computer Science, hand white-knuckled around his cane. She knows now that that must have been one of his bad days, for him to be gripping the cane so tightly, but at the time it was just an idle thought: _Wonder what happened to him_.

It's another of those things they don't talk about. They've worked together for over a year now, and he's never brought it up. She still doesn't know how it happened.

But she suspects.

See, it's not like she's the first vigilante Juuban's had. And definitely not the most famous.

No, that honor belongs to Endymion.

- o -

"The fuck?" said Lita around her mouthful of broccoli as they sat in the quad one day, eating lunch. "They can kick you out of college just because you can't figure out what you want to major in?"

"Apparently," grumped Sere, chin propped petulantly on her hands. She made puppy dog eyes at the hot dog octopus perched in the corner of Lita's tray, and Lita rolled hers, speared it on her fork and held it out to Sere.

"That's so bogus!" Mina said, all indignation as Sere chewed happily. "I thought college was about finding yourself, not your major!"

"Your naiveté is reaching pathetic levels," Rei said, and pointed her spoon at Sere. "And you. Just choose a fucking major already. It's not like they're tattooing it on your ass, they just wanna make sure you're taking classes that'll actually get you a job."

"What kind of job are we talking here?" Lita said. "'Cuz I'm pretty sure that Computer Sciences class is only going to result in one kind of job, and Sere's going to be giving it, not getting it."

Rei and Mina burst into hyena laughter.

Sere mock-glared at all three of them. "You're all bitches, you know that?"

"Takes one to know one," Rei said, wiping her eyes and taking out a compact to check her mascara. "Sooo, how _is_ Dr. House doing these days, Sere?"

Sere real-glared this time. "Don't call him that, Rei."

"What? It's a compliment. House is a genius."

"Well, thanks. I'm flattered."

They all craned their heads back. Sere's TA was standing just behind her, leaning on his cane. Rei turned as red as her lipstick. Darien looked at her for a moment, then turned his attention to Sere. "You left this behind in class today." He handed her a flashdrive that they'd been using for a code-writing assignment, and limped away.

They all watched him go. Then Lita whistled, long and low. "How's that foot taste in your mouth, Rei?"

"Shut up," Rei said without much heat, and looked at Sere. "How'd his leg get messed up again?"

Sere shrugged.

- o -

She didn't know it then, but Dare had put a tracking program on the flash drive that uploaded itself to her computer when she plugged it into the USB port. It kept track of all the searches she made and sites she visited, incognito browser or no, and sent them back to him. It was just Sere's luck that that happened to be the week she Googled "can bullet holes in motorcycle tires be patched" on her own computer instead of swinging by the local library to do it on one of the anonymous public computers.

That was why she'd taken the Computer Science class in the first place. To learn how to cover her own tracks online, and uncover others'. She hadn't expected it to be more about Word and Excel, and half the time, now that she looks back with the 20/20 hindsight of knowing that for the second half of the semester, Darien _knew_ who she was, she thinks he was teaching them useless things just to aggravate her.

- o -

Endymion wasn't the sort of vigilante kids dressed up as for Halloween. He was the kind of vigilante who left shattered femurs and paraplegics in his wake, the kind pop psychologists on TV clamored to have brought into custody because he wasn't a concerned citizen, he was a sociopath, and mark my words, Anderson, he is going to spin out of control.

Hard to catch someone who was little more than a shadow. Most of the time even the criminals left tied outside police precincts or in pools of blood outside emergency rooms couldn't describe what had hit them, could only slur _black_ and _cape_ and _he was so fast_.

It was only when a fuzzy cell phone camera finally caught a video of Endymion's dark shape disappearing over the lip of a rooftop with a small, red-caped figure beside him that anyone even realized the vigilante had a sidekick.

- o -

The first time an anonymous chat window popped up on her screen, it was while she was enjoying some well-earned PWP. She was tired, and dirty, and some fucker in an alley had sliced a gash in her elbow when she caught him pulling a gun on some poor lady for her purse.

_interesting reading material_, read the text. _i wouldn't have "pegged" you as the type..._

Holy _shit_. Sere clicked out of the window like her mouse was on fire, face burning. She had heard about people getting viruses through LJ, but never on AO3. God, was nothing sacred?

Another chime from her computer. _surely you don't think you can escape me that easily?_

Double shit. Sere slammed the laptop shut on her lap, heart hammering. She glanced at her window, leapt up to close the blinds, then stuffed her laptop under her pillow for good measure, wondering if it was possible to hack a person's computer to turn on their webcam even when the computer was off.

When she re-opened it the next morning to print a paper for class, a message was waiting for her:

_hope your tetanus boosters are up to date_

She looked down at the bandage around her elbow and slammed the computer shut again.

- o -

That was one of two times in her life she nearly passed out from something other than blood loss.

The other time was later that day, when her Computer Sciences TA called her to his desk in the back of the room to get one of her graded assignments and he handed it back to her with a tiny ziploc bag of penicillin paper-clipped to the rubric.

- o -

_Daredevil_, the newscasters called him, and speculated on his identity, and whether he was related to Endymion, whether he was some sort of hostage, some sort of prisoner. They brought in child psychologists and abuse counselors and CPS representatives to discuss Daredevil's situation, whether he was safe, whether he could be saved, could be rehabilitated.

Serena still remembers watching the interviews through the smudged windows of the run-down Radio Shack, clutching her backpack straps.

- o -

"Now I know why you always get crumbs stuck to your mouth when you're eating," Dare says that night when they're polishing off the last of the cold pizza in his fridge before patrol. "I figured it was just because you're a pig. But this lip gloss shit is sticky." He licks his lower lip, forehead creasing.

Sere eyes him. "You mean you put your mouth there on purpose?"

He just raises a brow back at her. "How else was I going to find out what your mouth tasted like?"

Heat rushes past the high collar of her suit. Sere shoves away from the table, clearing her throat. "Yeah, that's my cue to head out."

"If you must." He swivels back to his bank of computers, activates the feed from the camera in her helmet as she pulls it over her head. He makes an interested sound. "That's quite the heart rate the vitals sensors are picking up from you, White Rabbit, are you in some sort of distress?"

"Shut it," she says as she swings a leg over her motorcycle and revs into the too convenient-to-be-legal underground tunnel that'll take her to the docks. "And for fuck's sake, pay attention-it's my ass on the line if you get distracted while I'm out here."

"Which is why I always watch it most attentively," his voice murmurs into her earpiece, and fuck, the sensors better not pick up the way her pulse skips.

- o -

She keeps ignoring the come-ons, and he keeps fucking other people, girls who frown at Sere when she comes over to pick up repaired costume equipment, or drop off thumb drives. She hoists herself up onto the kitchen counter one day as he escorts number, like, twenty-seven out to her car in the driveway, and leans back on her elbows, swinging her legs like a little kid as he limps back inside.

"Aren't computer geeks supposed to prefer virtual girlfriends?" she says. "You know, like the ones on Sims or whatever?"

"It's not a matter of preference," he replies, dropping down on the couch and dry-swallowing a pill from the bottle on the table. "It's that most computer geeks can't actually get real women to have sex with them, which is a problem I-" he swallows another pill, "don't have. Obviously."

She stops swinging her legs and tilts her head to the side. "Can you actually do it, anyway?" It's a question she's had for a while, and if she tries to sugarcoat it, he'll just avoid it or joke it away. "With-you know." She nods at his braced leg.

He stops, about to swallow another pill. He rolls it in his fingers for a minute, looking at her, then smiles. "Serena Rose, your sensitivity never fails to dumbfound me." His smile becomes a smirk, lascivious. "It requires a little more work, maybe." His eyes don't leave hers as he puts the pill to his lips. "And, shall we say...creativity."

He swallows. Sere watches the smooth lift of his Adam's apple, the flex of his tendons under the skin as he levers himself up from the couch with his cane. His blade-sharp shoulder blades beneath his t-shirt as he makes his way into his office.

When she follows him into it, he's got headphones over his ears. He doesn't say anything as she puts her helmet on, or when she climbs onto her Rabbit cycle.

Her earpiece stays silent that night.

- o -

Sere had just moved in with her third foster family when a janitor arrived for his five a.m. shift at Stanton Enterprises and found a body splattered across the pavement. The remains wore Endymion's signature black cape and suit, had Endymion's black hair.

There was an open window nine stories up. Investigators determined Endymion had been pushed.

There were no fingerprints. No suspects. Just news theories about mob bosses, City Hall cover-ups, suicidal tendencies.

And rumors of a second, smaller body that had been whisked away from the scene.

- o -

"You think I don't have flags set up to alert me?" he says when she comes in the next day. He doesn't turn around; he's just a silhouette against his glowing computer screens, his back to her as he speaks. "You think I wouldn't know that you'd been snooping in my records?"

Sere narrows her eyes. "Yeah, 'cause you were so scrupulous about respecting my privacy," she says. Still remembers the flower that was on the tiny headstone in the cemetery when she made her solitary trip there on what should have been the baby's birthday, the blistering rage when she realized where it had come from, what he had done. "Don't be a bitch, _Dare_."

"I'll be a fucking whatever the hell I feel like," he shouts, and he's spinning, shoving up out of his chair, scrabbling for his cane, and it's half pitiful and half frightening, and Sere steps back, steps forward.

"Darien-"

"Get out."

"Dare-"

"Get _out_!"

She does.

But not before taking the Vicodin from its drawer in the living room, the extra bottles from the bathroom cabinet, the Actiq from the kitchen.

He wants to hurt?

Let him hurt.

- o -

(But she feels like shit for taking them, creeps out of her apartment at two that morning to take the bottles back in the middle of the night. Feels even more like shit for having taken them when she finds him slumped over at the kitchen table, the Actiq drawer open and empty, his skin clammy with sweat and breaths sharp and hitching.

She wakes him enough to get him to swallow the Vicodin, to stumble into his bedroom with his arm slung over her shoulder. She gets off his brace and curls up on the other side of the bed, back to him but ears strained to make sure his breathing goes back to normal.

Eventually, it does.

Eventually, she falls asleep too.

They don't say anything to each other the next morning.)

- o -

A few weeks later, some yakuza asshat manages to slash her calf deep enough to need stitches. She comms Dare with the situation, settles down on her own couch and pulls out her first aid kit, stripping out of her suit to the bra and shorts she wears underneath. She's smiling against her knee when a key scrapes in the front door and Dare lets himself in, the laptop case he hides his suture set in slung over his shoulder and throwing off his balance just enough that he has to hold onto the doorjamb as he maneuvers over the threshold.

"What are you grinning for?" he says as he shuts the door behind him. "You made it sound like you were bleeding out, you tease."

Sere says nothing, waits until he's stumped his way over to the couch. He levers himself onto the couch arm by her feet and sets his cane against the coffee table, then lifts her foot gently, so gently, one hand. He lowers himself to the cushion with the other, setting her foot in his lap and twisting toward her, bad leg splayed out beside the couch, to examine it. Already his fingers are tracing it carefully, probing for swelling and infection, and Sere stares at the bent head, the gleam of oil on hair that hasn't been washed in a few days.

"Turn on the lamp, would you," he says, and Sere stretches. Not for the lamp on the table but for his bad leg, stretched out in its brace beside the couch. She lifts it carefully onto the couch alongside hers, ignoring his little hiss of breath, and crawls forward. Huffs hot breaths onto his neck, his chin, as she twists to get her bad leg from between them, to maneuver so that her knees are on either side of his waist.

And then she kisses him.

Dare goes tense under her. Makes an aborted motion like he's about to flip her off of him, then goes very still. Sere keeps her lips pressed against his lower one, doesn't open her eyes where her lashes are against the dark bags beneath his, but goes still, too, breathing, waiting.

Slowly, so slowly, he loosens the grip he has on the back of her knees. Then he exhales against her and drags his hand up the back of her leg, long fingers splaying until they brush a place that makes her suck in a breath.

The gentleness of it is unexpected and not quite welcome; she closes her teeth around his lower lip, bites down into it and drags back until his lip pops free, hot and swollen and tasting like metal. With the hand that isn't pressed to his chest, grinding his nipple under her palm, she traces a hand up the inside of his thigh, fingers running just under the hard denim seam. He arches up, kisses harder; she feels him push his good leg against the arm of the couch, pushing himself up.

There's no talking, just low moans and hissed-out breaths and here and there a sharp inhalation as one of them jostles the other in a way that hurts. The way he goes liquid-still when it's her that hisses, the careful thumbs he rubs from the corners of her eyes to her temples, hurt more than the strain on her leg do, and she bites into his shoulder, the curve of his neck, presses into him until he stops, until his breath puffs hot and fast against her neck and he starts moving again. His fingers have learned to be clever to make up for the difficulty elsewhere, and she melts against him, slumps against his shoulder. "Darien," she mouths against his jaw, "Darien," trembling as he strokes.

And when she's full, liquid-hot and sweating, she manages to turn her head so that her eyelashes are against the pale underside of his chin, and say, "_Dare_."

He groans, and grips her hard, and if the way he breathes out her name makes her go boneless all over again, it is something she will never admit.

- o -

The next morning he pops an extra two pills of Vicodin and swabs an Actiq across his cheek and doesn't meet her eyes when she comes back from getting them coffee and finds him trying to struggle up from the couch with sweat pouring from his face and darkening the t-shirt he's pulled on inside out.

She drives him home-there's no way he's driving, not on a cocktail of Vicodin and Actiq-and he stares out the window the whole way, mutters a "thanks" when she helps him out of his passenger seat and up his front walk, and closes the front door in her face.

- o -

She lets him wallow for two days. Then she goes back to his place after patrol, letting herself in with the key he never gave her, and grips the back of the swivel chair he's sitting in as he stares at his bank of computers.

"I'm gonna regret admitting this," she says conversationally, pulling the back of the chair back so that she can look down into his face (and if it brings her chest into his line of sight, well, that works too), "but that was the best sex I've ever had."

Anyone might else might miss the drop of his jaw before he smirked humorlessly, eyes narrowing. "I don't need pity flattery."

Sere spins the chair. Climbs onto it and straddles his lap, being careful not to rest her weight on his bad hip. She grips the back of the chair and murmurs into his ear, "What about another word that starts with f?"

He pushes her off the chair, off of him, and struggles up himself. He reaches for his cane.

Sere steps in front of the door. "Y'know, this is why I kept ignoring you when you pulled out all those pick-up lines? I knew the minute we did have sex it would turn into this."

His eyes are hard in the dim glow of the computers. "Did you?" he snaps. "Why, because you knew the cripple wouldn't be able to keep up with you?"

"Because you don't think anyone can get past your messed-up leg," she snaps back. "You've got some sort of complex where you think just because you wake up in a million kinds of pain after we have sex I suddenly find you less attractive."

She takes a step forward, narrows her eyes at the expression that flashes across his face. Pushes her hand into the hair at the back of his head, grips it hard so she can pull herself to her tiptoes to put her lips against his ear. "Get your head," she says against his tragus, each word distinct and danger-soft, "Out. Of. Your. Ass."

Darien's free hand curls into a fist against her leg. Clenches, unclenches. The computer screen behind him collapses into its kaleidoscopic screensaver, sending alternating slices of colored light across his face.

"Do you know how much I hate you?" he says finally. "I hate you so much for being able to-to-" He stops, and runs a hand up her hip, the Kevlar weave encasing her waist, and his eyes are dark with lust, but not for her.

"I'll never be able to do any of it again," he says. "And sometimes this-" His hand jerks, gestures at the computers, the workbench in the computer, her. "It's not enough."

No.

Sere knows it's not.

- o -

He never ends up telling her how he got the injuries, exactly. But a time does come when he lets her help him out of the chair. It usually involves kissing and groping, and Serena's pretty sure he has a costume kink. "I'm just a freaking Barbie doll to you, aren't I," she says on one of the (many) times he unzips her with his teeth, and around the zipper in his teeth, he says, "No, you're more like the off-brand dolls they sell at Dollar Store that wish they were Barbies," and on another occasion his only reply is to pull out the reading glasses he wears on nights he's too tired to put in his contacts, and to push them on and eye her sternly from over the lenses, and that's not fucking fair, okay, because he knows what those do to her, and wow, yes, more of that, oh God, Dare, _yes_-

On other nights, she comes home from patrol and he's on her laptop in the living room, grinning at something he's reading, and it doesn't _look_ like porn, but that's the only thing she could think of that would cause that unholy grin...

He tilts his head back to look at her, exposing the screen, and Sere's ears go red.

"Honestly, carrot cakes? Writing fanfiction about yourself? Doesn't that violate some sort of RPF rule?"

She tries denial. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Hmm? That's funny. Because you're the only one I can think of who knows about _both_ of our tattoos-unless Rei's had sex with both of us?"

Sere cocks a brow, puts a hand on her hip. "I guess you'll never know, will you."

Dare reaches out, fingers the zipper running up the side of her costume. "You know," he says, "I have always found RPGing to be a far more enjoyable fandom pursuit than ficcing."

Sere laughs and climbs over the back of the couch onto his lap. Slings her arms around his shoulders. "Okay," she says."You can be the Rabbit-cycle. Get it? Because I'm going to ride y-"

"Stop. Do not finish that sentence."

Sere smirks, and kisses the pout from his lips. But a few minutes and several articles of clothing later, she starts making engine noises into his mouth. Dare snorts, starts laughing, shoving a hand into her hair as she grins and nuzzles into his neck to blow a raspberry.

Sometimes it's not enough.

But sometimes it is.


End file.
